How Migration Seasons the Local Kitchen

A plate of chicken tikka masala in a Glasgow curry house. A fortune cookie cracked open at the end of a meal in San Francisco. A bowl of couscous on a Paris table on a Sunday. Each one tastes of a road, of people who moved and the kitchens that met them when they arrived.

People who leave home carry very little. What they carry is usually the food. A spice tin wrapped in a shirt. A starter kept alive in a jar. A recipe no one wrote down because no one needed to. The cargo is small. What it does to the place it lands is not.

Old roads, new plates

Before the 1500s, Indian cooking had heat, but the heat came from black pepper and long pepper. There was no chilli. Portuguese traders carried chillies from the Americas to the coast of India in the sixteenth century, and within a few generations the plant had gone so deep into the cooking that it is hard to picture a vindaloo or a Kolhapuri curry without it.

The same ships carried tomatoes and potatoes east and south, and carried pepper, cloves and nutmeg back to Europe. A kitchen does not ask where an ingredient was born. It asks whether it is useful, and then it keeps it.

Where borders blur

Chicken tikka masala is usually credited to Glasgow in the 1970s, to Ali Ahmed Aslam of the Shish Mahal, who is said to have made a sauce for a customer who found his chicken too dry. Other cooks and other cities claim it too, and the argument has never been settled. What is settled is the shape of the thing: a Punjabi grill, a British plate, and a gravy that belongs to both.

The fortune cookie has an even stranger passport. It came from Japanese bakers in California, descended from the tsujiura senbei sold in Kyoto, crisp folded wafers with a paper fortune tucked in the bend. Chinese restaurants in America adopted it, and the country it is named after has never served it.

The baguette and the pickle

Banh mi is a meeting you can hold in one hand. The baguette came with French rule. The pickled carrot, the daikon, the coriander and the chilli were already there. When Vietnamese families settled around the world after 1975, they carried the sandwich with them, along with pho, and both are now street food in cities that could not have found Vietnam on a map fifty years earlier.

What France chose

France guards its cooking more fiercely than most countries. Yet couscous, carried north by families from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, has topped French polls of favourite dishes. Merguez, the spiced lamb sausage of North Africa, is standard at French street grills and football grounds. The country that wrote the rules of the classical kitchen let a grain from across the Mediterranean onto the Sunday table, and it stayed.

The crowded table

Walk through any big city and you can read its history in the shopfronts. Little Italy, Chinatown, a street of Turkish grills, a row of Ethiopian cafes. Each began as a piece of home for people far from it. Each became, for everyone else, the easiest way to cross a border without a passport.

Yesterday’s strange ingredient is today’s supermarket staple. The jar of gochujang, the tub of hummus, the bag of tortilla flour. A few years before they reached the shelf, someone had to carry them in a suitcase.

Food usually arrives before everything else. Before the music, before the books, before the language, there is a plate set down in front of a stranger. It speaks first, and it asks nothing.

The longer table

People keep moving, the way rivers keep moving, and wherever they go the land turns green behind them. A new arrival opens a stall. A neighbour tries the bread. The bread outlives the stall, and the neighbour’s grandchildren think it was always theirs.

Look at your own plate tonight. Somewhere in it is a road someone walked so you would not have to.